“It’s starting,” he said. “I believe all the fire departments are getting their grass equipment ready.

“It’s that time of the year. You have to be careful.”

Mike Krul, St. Clair assistant chief, said the Thursday fire in East China was off Bree Road near the DTE property.

“It was just accidental,” he said. “They had a clear area like a campfire, and with the wind it just got away from them.”

He said people need to be aware that brush fires can spread quickly.

“Absolutely, everything is starting to dry out a little bit,” he said. “Especially with the sun being out, that’s going to dry things out, and the wind is going to dry things out.

“Especially, you got a lot of the dead stuff from last year, it’s had time to sort of dry out from the winter time,” he said. “You have the marsh grasses and phragmites and those things are like tinder right now.”

He said people are starting to do spring cleanup.

“There’s a lot of people that are trying to get rid of stuff, branches and trees that went down during the wintertime … but they have to be very cautious about where they burn and how they burn,” Krul said.

He said people who burn should always have a nearby water source.

“You have to pay attention to the wind and you have to pay attention to your sources,” he said. “You have to make sure you have a clear area that you’re doing it in, an area that’s not going to catch something else on fire.”

People who burn outside need a burn permit. Contact your local township or city, or go their websites for information about how to get a burn permit.

The Michigan Department of Natural Resources also is advising that people in the southern Lower Peninsula not burn outside,

According to a department news release, dead vegetation such as grasses, leaves and residual crops are dry and ignite easily, said Jeffrey Vasher, fire management specialist for the Michigan Department of Natural Resources’ Roscommon Incident Command Center.

“Everything right now is just so dry and dead from the winter,” he said. “It can burn quick and fast.”

The advisory applies to much of the state south of U.S. 10, which runs east and west across the state from Ludington to Bay City, said Paul Rogers, fire officer supervisor in the DNR’s Plainwell office.

“There are going to be intermittent higher winds through the weekend,” Rogers said in the news release. “We’ve had several fires through the past days, and smaller structures have been lost.”

State law allows for the burning of leaves, grass, limbs, brush, stumps and evergreen needles. It also allows for burning some types of household paper materials that do not contain plastic, foam, chemically treated wood, textiles, electronics, chemicals or hazardous materials. Those must be contained in a covered metal or masonry burning vessel with an opening no larger than three-quarters of an inch.

Contact Bob Gross at (810) 989-6263 or rgross@gannett.com. Follow him on Twitter @RobertGross477.